Fear Grips Burundi In Wake Of Tribal War

Talk Of Peace Fails To Calm Refugees

NTEGA, BURUNDI — The tribal savagery that erupted in this border village last month and left thousands of people dead is only a fading memory, to hear some officials tell it.

``Now peace reigns,`` said Solomon Nimpa, a local administrator who was overseeing the distribution of a truckload of used clothing last Thursday.

``The people are coming home, without any distinction.``

But those who gathered to tell gruesome stories of the killings all belonged to the Tutsi tribe, or Tall Ones. Even after Nimpa sent an aide to search the area, not a single member of the Hutu tribe-the Short Ones-could be found.

The tribal warfare began Aug. 15 in Ntega and in the neighboring town of Marandara and continued for nearly two weeks. Each tribe has accused the other of initiating the slaughter.

The Tutsi tribe dominates this central African country of 5 million people, including the government and the military, even though the Tutsis make up just 15 percent of the population. The Hutu are primarily subsistence farmers.

``They (the Hutus) are scared to death, and with good reason,`` said a diplomat who toured the region last week to assess the needs of refugees.

``The question now is, `Where are the Hutus?` ``

In the countryside around Ntega, carpeted with a lush patchwork of coffee and banana trees and vegetable patches, most of the mud farm huts still stand empty, the doors hanging open.

``Whatever started this trouble, the cause was Burundi`s obsession with ethnicity,`` said another diplomat. ``That visceral fear dominates politics and will dominate the future of this country.``

The government said the Hutus set off the violence when they began to slaughter their Tutsi neighbors under the influence of drugs and the propaganda of exiled radicals in neighboring Tanzania.

Hutu accounts have it that a Tutsi soldier sparked the unrest by killing two Hutu farmers or that unexpected army maneuvers in the area panicked Hutu who feared they would be massacred.

The government had admitted that some 5,000 were dead after the army moved in on Aug. 17 to crush the revolt. Unofficial estimates put Hutu deaths as high as 20,000.

Hutu refugees in neighboring Rwanda have charged that army helicopters pursued them as they fled through border swamps; scores have shown what they said were bayonet wounds inflicted by Burundi soldiers.

Acknowledging that the refugee problem will remain in spite of repatriation talks, the Rwandans last week began moving an estimated 50,000 Hutu refugees from crude camps near the border to new tent cities. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees appealed for $4.7 million to feed and clothe the Hutus for the rest of the year.

But even as President Pierre Buyoya toured the two towns last Friday in a move to reassure the residents, there were fresh signs of tribal tension in the country.

In the capital, Bujumbura, diplomats reported that the government had detained five Hutu intellectuals who signed a letter to the president charging that government troops had carried out a massacre in putting down the short-lived Hutu uprising.

The 28 signers, including several university professors, said the recent violence made them fear a repetition of the genocide of 1972, when 100,000 Hutus were systematically killed by the army.

In that clash, educated Hutus were singled out for elimination following a Hutu-led coup attempt. The revolt came a decade after Burundi gained independence from Belgium.

``It`s obvious that the advantage acquired by the (Tutsi) ruling class for more than 20 years must be protected, and all means are considered good for that end,`` said the letter. The Hutus, the letter continued, once again were being portrayed as ``the enemy of the nation.``

``Power remains regional, clannish and above all tribal,`` the letter said. ``Burundi, small and poor, makes it difficult to divide a cake that gets smaller day by day.``

The massacres have badly blotted the record of President Buyoya, who had been given high marks by Western observers for his cautious moves to relax discriminatory laws.

For example, shortly after taking power in a coup last September, he abolished pass laws that had made it difficult for Hutus to travel freely around the country.

During an anniversary speech last weekend, Buyoya blamed ``antinational elements`` for the recent violence that he said was intended to ``spread panic in the population.``

``We have guaranteed free expression in Burundi, but we won`t accept those who make it a travesty,`` he said.

The official explanation seems to mean little to shocked survivors of the fighting around Ntega.

``It makes no sense to me,`` said Pelagie Madamu, 37, who said she had lost both parents and her husband during the first days of the fighting.

``We drank from the same tap, we shared the same fruit,`` she said of her former Hutu neighbors.

A 12-year-old boy told of watching his father and five brothers killed with machetes. He spent a week hiding in a tree, he said.

``I cannot understand why they did it,`` he said.

Others already had given up trying to fathom the conflict.

``These things will happen,`` said Jean Ndayizeye, the police commissioner from the nearby provincial center of Kirundo. ``Life is a perpetual struggle.``